2013-01-12

APOGEE meeting, day 2

The meeting was mostly science today, with various collaboration teams showing results on chemistry and dynamics in the Milky Way disk. An extreme stand-out for me was work by Gail Zasowski (OSU) on diffuse interstellar bands observed in the spectra as absorption lines tracing the ISM. These could be combined with Bovy's stellar tracers to build a highly assumption-free model of the disk. There were many other beautiful results shown. I kept encouraging the teams to make sure they publish before SDSS-III DR10, both because that's when everything goes public, and because there will be a fun press release. Late in the day the discussion of DR10 to-do items started. The APOGEE team has its work cut out for itself: This is the reward for building a great spectrograph and using it with creativity and efficiency.